Dark Fantasy Lite - Sea of Shadows

There's plenty to like in Kelley Armstrong's new Age of Legends Trilogy, starting with Sea of Shadows. A ritual meant to keep vengeful spirits at bay takes place annually in the Forest of the Dead . Twin girls are just old enough to conduct the ritual themselves, but things don't go smoothly-their entire village is wiped out by shadow monsters, and it's up to them to travel to the Imperial City to warn the emperor.

Armstrong did a lot of things right in this fantasy. I'm a sucker for rituals and legends coming to the foreground, and the legendary creatures that represent the main peril of this story were described in great detail. The narrative had darker strains, with great mood in the way the Forest of the Dead was depicted, as well as the devastation wrought on Edgewood, the village that lies just beyond. Characterization was spot on, both for the twins Ashyn and Moria and for the two other survivors, Ronan and Gavril, and the surprise twist at the end will absolutely keep me reading the rest of the series.

The main drawback of this series was the world building itself. The concept is a fine one, and I really appreciated that it had a more Eastern flavor in its underpinnings, but the depth and breadth of the world building were insufficient to match the concept. As I was reading, I could feel the potential for world building to have happened on an epic scale. Its beginnings were there, but in the end the language wasn't hefty enough to bring the world to life as much as it promised. Part of that was the action-oriented pacing of the plot, which focused on fighting monsters. There was nothing wrong with these segments, but they did stop us from feeling the world in all its fullness, and the book in truth could have been twice as long in its description to really draw me in to the universe.

Another thing that detracted was the sometimes too transparent use of culturally specific details. The worst offender was the ritual suicide as a form of defeat. The self-stab and then beheading for honor's sake is just too specific to Japan, and it pulled me out of the world. You want to use that concept? Fine, but make it your own in some way, don't just cut and paste. It was world building at its laziest.

And lastly, the author seems to have been confused about just what kind of threat she wanted to write about. The things that come out of the forest: are they shadow vapors? vengeful ghosts? shadow-stalkers, which is sort of like the walking dead? That concept was not cohesive. Discovering the source of the disruption is framed with a sense of urgency-figure it out, fix the problem, contain the spirits. But the political intrigue that becomes apparent in the last quarter of the book, while interesting, does not jibe with what we'd been presented with thus far, and does raise questions about the direction of the rest of the series. My vote is for something more spiritual and mysterious, rather than man-manipulated sorcery.

Overall I liked Sea of Shadows, but felt it was playing it a little safe. And for dark fantasy, you never want that. Hopefully the second installment will pick up the slack.

K Rating: 3.5/5
(No more 10s: too many numbers to keep track of)
**New Author Goal: 16 out of 30**

#15 was another I put down after about 75 pages: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. I really wanted to like that book, but the writing was just atrocious, and little stupidities kept me from being engaged. Medieval Carcassone had suburbs? Really????